Thursday, May 21, 2015

Written January 28 - Posted May 22

Every so often I lose touch with the significance of
what Guy and I are doing here on this little piece of land. Then along comes a
book or an article that puts things into perspective again, such as this
article by Nafeez Ahmed: Nasa-funded
study: industrial civilisation headed for ‘irreversible collapse’?

Nafeez writes about a study, partly sponsored by
Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center, that looks at the possibility that our
global industrial civilization is headed for collapse.

[The study] finds that according to the historical record
even advanced, complex civilisations are
susceptible to collapse, raising questions about the sustainability of modern
civilisation:

"The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not
more) advanced Han, Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced
Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to the fact that advanced,
sophisticated, complex, and creative civilizations can be both fragile and
impermanent."

By investigating the human-nature dynamics of these past
cases of collapse, the project identifies the most salient interrelated factors
which explain civilisational decline, and which may help determine the risk of
collapse today: namely, Population, Climate, Water, Agriculture, and Energy.

Permaculture, an approach to living
sustainably on the Earth, could save us from the catastrophe of the collapse of
western industrial civilisation, which sometimes seems awfully close. The news
that the new director of NASA is a climate-denier adds a notch on the toppling
timber.

Once
again I understand our commitment here on this farm to be part of the global
effort to bring some sanity and hope to our civilisation. We do not deal here
in cynicism, consumerism, commodification of people (racism, sexism, pornography),
selfies, swear words. We eat little meat and avoid processed foods. We are
trying to find the simple and basic ways of meeting our need for shelter and
food, comfort, friendship, entertainment, beauty.

Kimberly and Cesar transport gravel to cob construction site.

Guy supervises placement of gravel.

We
do use technology and the internet, we have a car (flex: gas or alcohol). We
use gas for cooking for now. We get electricity from the municipal grid.

But
slowly we are moving in the direction of solar cooking as much as possible, as
well as solar heat for our shower, and solar panels for electricity. We already
use only a dry toilet system with composting of human waste in addition to a
separate compost area for kitchen and garden waste. Our use of electricity is
minimal: four overhead lights, six outlets for our gadgets, the refrigerator
and an electric shower.

We tried a new technique: in the strip above we burned wood to char, then covered.
Thanks to Hale, who helped us with this project.

T

Eventually we successfully planted mustard, arrugula, lettuce, radishes and cilantro in
the char strip.

Gardening

continues to present us with constant disappointments: pests of many varieties
(ants, caterpillars, grasshoppers, aphids, cutting worms, and other bugs we
never see except for the damage they leave), and failure to thrive that we
still don’t understand. We use no chemical fertilizers or pesticides as most of
our neighbors do. We haven’t been able to find answers in books or on the
internet for our specific problems, so as we find our own solutions we’ll be
able to share with others in our area.

There’s
actually a lot of interest in organic vegetables in this area for two reasons:
a) the knowledge of the negative health effects of chemical fertilizers and
pesticides is becoming more widespread and people decry that Brazilian food is
the most contaminated in the world; and therefor b) the market for organic
foods grows not only in the big cities but in the small towns like Cocalzinho
as well.

Green coffee beans. We have two young plants and this is their first crop.